The MOOC Honeymoon is Over: Three Takeaways from the Coursera Calamity

The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera…

How Patriotic

Similar:Coding Bootcamps and the New For-Profit Higher EdThere are actually a number of narrative…AcademiaAmazon’s Tactics Confirm Its Critics’ Worst SuspicionsThis week, as part of a contract dispute…BooksIf you like to play with words, good newsI wish there were a secret day between F…CultureGirlhood 2014They don’t even seem to want to watch Fr…CultureHow do I cite…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:USDA's MyPlate – Home page I have mostly a good first impressi…EducationWhat’s Up With That: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own TyposA readable Wired article about why proof…CultureChallenger Disaster: 30 YearsI was a high school senior, watching on …CybercultureYesterday we took advantage of a rare free…

A Wealth of Words

People with similar vocabulary sizes may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding. Nonetheless, there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary. Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the…

Pinkalicious — “Buzz Off”

My daughter plays the Bumblebee in “Buzz Off,” which both ended Act I and opened Act II in last weekend’s Stage Right! production of Pinkalicious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gr6jlrndSU Similar:Snowfall at the White House (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour, Jan 7) Tweeted by W…My social media feed was full of people …AestheticsFrazetta's "A Princess of Mars"…

Make Games in the Classroom with Inform 7

I’ll blog pretty much anything that has to do with Inform 7. Text-based games, or interactive fiction, have continued to evolve since the days of Zork. Many works can be powerful for play in the classroom: Emily Short’s “interactive epistolary” First Draft of the Revolution, Andrew Plotkin’s physics-grounded Dual Transform, Peter Nepstad’s historically grounded 1893: A…

Almost Flat Design

Apple, Google and Microsoft have very different design aesthetics. Almost Flat Design | Matthew Moore Design. Similar:Computers and Writing 2020 Funding Request: SubmittedMy contributions this year are a worksho…AcademiaI'd love to do a shift at these gorgeous #neovictorian workstations, created in #Blender3D…AestheticsCaptain Gearhart found some stairwell problems on his latest #Unity3D tour of his #Blender……

Why You Never Truly Leave High School

It’s also abundantly, poignantly clear that during puberty, kids have absolutely no clue how to assess character or read the behavior of others. In 2005, the sociologist Koji Ueno looked at one of the largest samples of adolescents in the United States, and found that only 37 percent of their friendships were reciprocal—meaning that when…

Surviving the Next Apocalypse: a Modest Curriculum

Obviously, given this surge in student demand, we need to make survivalist education another distinctive feature of our educational mission, and we must scramble to build institutional capacity in “apocalypse preparedness.” The admissions office already has brochures: “Where would you send your child: someplace that prepares them for a 20th-century job, or a community that…